This all-embracing and all-absorbing power of the church lasted about a thousand years and ended with the Reformation, though it had begun to decline some two centuries earlier. For this condition of things the Roman empire had prepared the way. It was the prototype to which, in part unconsciously and in part consciously, ecclesiastical authority was made to conform. Notwithstanding the fact that the Gospel was first widely proclaimed in Greek lands and the body of its doctrine formulated in the Greek tongue, when the church began to aspire to universal dominion it naturally assumed the garb of Roman secular authority. The Eastern Empire was regarded as an offshoot from, rather than as a continuation of, the empire that had so long ruled the world from the great city on the banks of the Tiber. The natural consequence was that the Latin language in time supplanted the Greek, and ecclesiastical thought flowed in the channels worn by the political thought that had preceded it. The struggle in later times for the supremacy of the state as against the church was merely the effort to return to a condition of things that had existed before the establishment of the church. The Greeks were not less patriotic than the Romans. The state occupied just as prominent a place in their minds as it did in the minds of the Romans. But it was their misfortune to appear upon the scene of history, broken up into a large number of small polities of nearly equal strength, and the Greek mind never got beyond the particularism thus inherited. It was their fundamental concept of government. Rome represented a more advanced type of political development than Greece, and if it had been permitted to work out its own salvation without external interference,—for the city at its worst was hardly more corrupt than many a modern capital—it might be in existence to-day. The Roman empire endured so long because it was upheld by the patriotism of its citizens. This was often narrowly selfish, and frequently grossly unjust to foreigners, but it was effectual in maintaining the supremacy of Rome against all attempts from within or without to subvert it. The Romans that were drawn toward philosophy pursued it in a half-hearted manner because the state occupied the first place in their minds. To serve the state was the ultimate goal of their ambition. The emperors, even the most corrupt, still represented the government and as such received the homage of good men. If we keep this fact in mind we shall be able to understand the bravery and devotion to duty of many of the officers and even soldiers in the imperial forces. More or less out of reach of the contaminating influences that were so powerful in the capital, they performed the services expected of them as became Romans.